real — safe – Los Angeles
Opening Reception + Performance
Friday, July 7, 2017, 6-10 PM
rsvp@hvw8.com
HVW8 Gallery is pleased to present Real — Safe a multi-medium collection of installation works by Los Angeles based artist Kilo Kish. Through film, performance, and immersive soundscapes Kish aims to create the fabricated nature of our online interactions in real life. The exhibition explores the poles of reality, which she has deemed hyper-reality, perceived reality, and actuality. Her performance installation confronts our need for personal space in public and freedom online. Through strategic musical composition and timing, she tests comfortable and uncomfortable forms of attention in public.
In addition to the performance installation, various film-works created in collaboration with photographers Sam Massey and Emmanuel Olunkwa will be on view in the adjacent gallery. These films allude to similar subjects on her debut LP, “Reflections in Real Time”, including the relationship between technology and our emotional wellbeing. These films reflect mundane moments transformed to grandeur through social media and online interaction.
Real — Safe softly surveils the curatorial labor of the viewer in self-presentation, performativity, and self-importance, and reciprocates the exchange value of that virtualized selfhood back to the reader. An exploitative embrace that creates a loving singularity between past object, present subject, and future context, Real — Safe accelerates past the ninth circle of self-referential hell and triggers blissfully blasé consensual appropriation.
Kish Robinson has been making genre-bending, experimental music projects under the moniker Kilo Kish since 2012. Starting first as a student of design at Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, Kish has been heralded for her cross-medium approach to creating music. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Vogue, W, Fader, and The Village Voice. Kish released her debut full length LP “Reflections in Real Time (RRT)” in 2016 through her own label, kisha soundscape + audio (ksa). She is currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA.
Media Contact: Jessica McCormack jessica@artsandculturepr.com
Still from Kilo Kish Installation film ‘It’s What I Thought I Wanted’
real—safe an essay by Michelle Joan Papillion
Lakisha Robinson is apart of the exciting new wave coming back into the art
world. She like many new young emerging artists are working conceptually and
multidisciplinary. Under her Kilo Kish project she has pursued ideas in music,
fashion, film and performance.
In 2016 she released Reflections in Real Time. This full-length album chronicles
what appear to be her day-to-day thoughts on her own emotions and feelings. I
was lucky enough to have gone to her record release party in Los Angeles when
this album came out. The entire evening felt like a scene from Spike Jonze’
Being John Malkovich but this is what Robinson wanted. She wanted the
audience to step inside her mind whether it is weird or uncomfortable or
strange, she was opening herself up. During the evening as the record played
different characters around the room acted out scenes. Later on during the Life
Aquatic Tour with Vince Staples she would create a performance that included
her and two other women called “employees”. You see these women appear in
the visuals from that tour and in this exhibition.
The 3-channel installation in “real—safe” brings the interactive experience back
to the audience. At times your trying to figure out what’s actually going on, at
other moments your completely relating. For example the last few minutes of
the video when the voices are chanting “Love you, so much for the follow back,
love you for life” the dialogue sounds like the comments section on social
media.
What Robinson is attempting in her work is not to celebrate or examine the
“otherness” rather she is giving you glimpses into a world that we all are
participants in. A reality where the viewer is also being viewed. A reality where
anything you do or type can become viral for any reason or no reason at all. This
exhibition brings you into the hidden space. The secret vulnerability we as the
viewer and the viewed are also experiencing in real time in real life. This type of
work has great art historical context with artists like Adrian Piper and Yoko Ono
who both have created public works in performance and video that redirected
the lens of society back on to itself.
With real—safe being a third iteration of the Reflections in Real Time project we
see Lakisha Robinson’s ideas come full circle. The fluidity in how she works
being expressed at great level in this exhibition
